Most Helpful Books?

[sahiphop]

Hey guys, as I'm venturing into C++ for the first time, I'm glad to say I'm getting the basic idea for it. I'm wondering though out of the many books I've seen, which ones would you recommend that are the most relevant to giving me the idea how to program for the Dreamcast? I'm not sure if there even exists a book on game dev for Dreamcast, but since there's so many ways to program, I'm trying to find a way to narrow it down to just learning how to do it with Dev C++ and DC Dev ISO 4... so if there exists any books that can teach me, I'm looking for one that covers fundamentals and advanced 3D game dev.

So which ones have you read that gave you an understanding of game dev for Dreamcast? What would you recommend?

[OneThirty8]

I tried a few books and didn't really learn much. Also, I found C a bit easier to pick up, and that's generally the language I choose to use. I actually started with SDL tutorials. SDL isn't the best choice for something designed specifically for the Dreamcast (using the KOS API is going to give you better performance once you learn how to use it), but for a platform game SDL should do the job for you. I'd start writing code to run on your PC just to get a handle on programming in C and/or C++. Here's a link to some tutorials I found helpful: http://cone3d.gamedev.net

[Quzar]

I'm in somewhat of a minority in that I don't really feel that it doesn't matter what you start with other than good fundamentals. I learned programming and computer basics from a high school textbook from the 80s that taught Apple BASIC and practiced it on an Apple IIc. The key (IMHO) is to learn certain basics no matter the language: program flow, conditionals, memory manipulation, etc.

Anyways, the best recommendation I can give is to find the website to a beginner university course for C. Most now put pretty much 100% of the material taught in classes online, and not only that but don't use a book (or perhaps use something like the K&R C book). If you look up "15-123" you'll find CMU's (my Alma Mater) intro to C/UNIX course there are maybe 3 or 4 public websites spanning as many years that all have similar material here's one http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~thoffman/S10-15123/

[emptythought]

Check your local library. They have programming books & C/C++ reference books.